So now each president worse that the last
becomes each election worse than the last
and I hear him say forcefully, “Halloween,
is not about candy, oh, no, no it is so much

More ancient than that,” all Hallows Eve the
seasonal turn into something else that has
to do with sacrifice, the dying time gone so
obviously genocide here, genocide there, oh,

Innocent lives given over to this strange rite
of atonement that is at-one-ment the time
when everything goes so timeless and clocks
lose an hour our lives lost in bio-rhythm-less-

Ness with the weather itself something else
that, too, like that moment the quadrennial
horse race loses all joy and the candidates,
the candidates come up out of their graves so

Ever zombie politicians speaking the old words
of their spells as if they don’t know it has all
changed again into something else all cobwebs
and something, musty horrible clutching cling-

Ing dust in your throat and bringing with it the
last, very last, the final selection election rite.

 

James Van Looy has been a fixture in Boston’s poetry venues since the 1970s. He is a member of Cosmic Spelunker Theater and has run poetry workshops for Boston area homeless people at Pine Street Inn and St. Francis House since 1992. Van Looy leads the Labyrinth Creative Movement Workshop, which his Labyrinth titled poems are based on. His work appears weekly in Oddball Magazine.